This type of comment is unlikely to be popular here, but I can't help but cringe when I read articles that disregard or make light of suffering in the name of progress.
If I blogged about how I had started feeding my children a "diet designed to induce diabetes" I imagine people would be appalled.
Regardless of where you ultimately fall on the issue of mistreating animals, it is ethically lazy not to (at a minimum) turn your mind to the issue rather than simply turning to "those stalwarts of medical research" yet again.
It does a bunch of other things as well, many of which are likely to be as important. The bottom line is that aging is damage - an accumulation of broken molecular machinery in and around cells. Autophagy is a collection of repair processes inside cells that eliminate broken machinery, allowing it to be replaced with new-built versions. So all other things being equal you should have a better, longer-lasting body with higher levels of autophagy, or more efficient autophagy.
"Some research groups are making the case that all roads lead to autophagy, the process of tearing down and replacing worn cellular components, when it comes to enhancing healthy longevity through adjustments to metabolism. Examples include calorie restriction (CR) - which you can manage all by yourself today - or drugs that mimic some of the effects of CR on regulatory mechanisms in our biochemistry, which you're going to have to wait a little longer for. But it's all down to increased autophagy, they say."
(But of course all other things are never equal - that's half the fun of trying to understand the interaction of metabolism and aging given today's technology and knowledge. Lots of very fuzzy answers to imprecise questions).
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Note that autophagy runs on a bunch of machinery that can be damaged over time just like all the rest of the cell's inner workings. The chief culprit here is an accumulation of things that the lysosome, the furnace into which all the broken machinery is thrown, cannot handle. So lysosomes, a roving fleet of furnaces in your cells, become bloated and malfunctioning as you grow older, stuffed to the gills with gunk that they can't break down.
One solution under development is bioremediation using bacterial enzymes - supporting the SENS Foundation will help speed this research:
Senescent cells have removed themselves from operation due to age or damage and are requesting destruction - under the best of circumstances, anyway. It is the immune system's job to kill off these lost cause cells - and the precancerous cells, and nip a bunch of other problems in the bud while it's at it - but the immune system becomes increasingly weak with age, and hence the growth in the number of unculled senescence cells. These cells sit in tissue as increasingly bad actors, well past their sell-by date, taking actions that harm surrounding cells and structures.
Exercise impacts the immune system: it unambiguously improves it, all other things being equal. It's not unreasonable to expect that exercise helps with senescent cells in part because of its effect on immune system health:
If I blogged about how I had started feeding my children a "diet designed to induce diabetes" I imagine people would be appalled.
Regardless of where you ultimately fall on the issue of mistreating animals, it is ethically lazy not to (at a minimum) turn your mind to the issue rather than simply turning to "those stalwarts of medical research" yet again.